Later Galen and Hippocrates became a little more accessible, not by translation from the Greek, but by translation from the Arabic of a Syriac version. The first work to be so rendered was a version of Aphorisms of Hippocrates which, however, as we have seen, were already available in Latin dress, together with the Hippocratic Regimen in acute diseases, and certain works of Galen as corruptly interpreted by Isaac Judaeus. These were rendered from Arabic into Latin by Constantine, an African adventurer who became a monk at Monte Cassino and died there in 1087. Constantine was a wretched craftsman with an imperfect knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. More effective was the great twelfth century translator from the Arabic, Gerard of Cremona (died 1185), who turned many medical works into Latin from Arabic, and who was followed by a whole host of imitators. Yet more important for the advance of medicine, however, was the learned revival of the thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based on translations from Arabic, but a certain number of works were also rendered direct from the Greek. During the thirteenth century Aristotle’s scientific works began to be treated in this way, but more important for the course of medicine were those of Galen, and they had to wait till the following century. The long treatise of Galen, περὶ χρείας τῶν ἐν ἀνθρώπου σώματι μορίων, On the uses of the bodily parts in man, was translated from the Greek into Latin by Nicholas of Reggio in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. This work, with all its defects, was by far the best account of the human body then available. Many manuscripts of the Latin version have survived, and it was translated into several vernaculars, including English, and profoundly influenced surgery. The rendering into Latin of this treatise, and its wide distribution, may be regarded as the starting-point of modern scientific medicine. Its appearance is moreover a part of the phenomenon of the revived interest in dissection which had begun to be practised in the Universities in the thirteenth century,[139] and was a generally accepted discipline in the fourteenth and fifteenth.[140]
Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy was almost imperceptible. During the fifteenth century more Galenic and Hippocratic texts were recovered and gradually turned into Latin, but still without vitally affecting the course of Anatomy. The actual printing of collected editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather late, for the debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to prefer Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions appeared, so that medicine made no advance corresponding to the progress of scholarship. The Hippocratic works were first printed in 1525, and an isolated edition of the inferior Galen in 1490, but the real advance in Medicine was not made by direct study of these works. So long as they were treated in the old scholastic spirit such works were of no more value than those of the Arabists or others inherited from the Middle Ages. Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and it was not until the investigator began actually to compare his own observations with those of Hippocrates and Galen that the real value of these works became apparent. The department in which this happened first was Anatomy, and such revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518), who never published, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose great work appeared in 1543, were really basing their work on Galen, though they were much occupied in proving Galen’s errors. Antonio Benivieni (died 1502), an eager prophet of the new spirit, revived the Hippocratic tradition by actually collecting notes of a few cases with accompanying records of deaths and post-mortem findings, among which it is interesting to observe a case of appendicitis.[141] His example was occasionally followed during the sixteenth century, as for instance, by the Portuguese Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus (1511-c. 1562), who printed no fewer than seven hundred cases; but the real revival of the Hippocratic tradition came in the next century with Sydenham (1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738), who were consciously working on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring to extend the Hippocratic experience.
Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest of the sixteenth century surgeons, the lovable and loving Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), though he was, as he himself humbly confessed, an ignorant man knowing neither Latin nor Greek, can be shown to have derived much from the works of antiquity, which were circulating in translation in his day and were thus filtering down to the unlearned.
Texts of Hippocrates and of Galen had formed an integral part in the medical instruction of the universities from their commencement in the thirteenth century. The first Greek text of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates appeared in 1532, edited by no less a hand than that of François Rabelais. With the further recovery of the Greek texts and preparation of better translations, these became almost the sole mode of instruction during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The translators became legion and their competence varied. One highly skilled translator, however, is of special interest to English readers. Thomas Linacre (1460?-1524), Physician to Henry VIII, Tutor to the Princess Mary, founder and first president of the College of Physicians, a benefactor of both the ancient Universities and one of the earliest, ablest, most typical, and most exasperating of the English humanists, spent much energy on this work of translation for which his abilities peculiarly fitted him. He was responsible for no less than six important works of Galen, of which one, the De temperamentis et de inaequali intemperie, printed at Cambridge in 1521, was among the earliest books impressed in that town and is said to be the first printed in England for which Greek types were used. It has been honoured by reproduction in facsimile in modern times. Such works as these, purely literary efforts, had great vogue for a century and more, and were much in use in the Universities. These humanistic products sometimes produced, among the advocates of the new scientific method, a degree of fury which was only rivalled by that of some of the humanists themselves towards the translators from the Arabic. But these are now dead fires. As the clinical and scientific methods of teaching gained ground, textual studies receded in medical education, as Hippocrates and Galen themselves would have wished them to recede.
The texts of Hippocrates and Galen have now ceased to occupy a place in any medical curriculum. Yet all who know these writings, know too, not only that their spirit is still with us, but that the works themselves form the background of modern practice, and that their very phraseology is still in use at the bedside. Modern medicine may be truly described as in essence a creation of the Greeks. To realize the nature of our medical system, some knowledge of its Greek sources is essential. It would indeed be a bad day for medicine if ever this debt to the Greeks were forgotten, and the loss would be at least as much ethical as intellectual. But there is happily no fear of this, for the figure and spirit of Hippocrates are more real and living to-day than they have been since the great collapse of the Greek scientific intellect in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era.
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Footnotes:
[1] The word Biology was introduced by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776-1837) in his Biologie oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur, 6 vols., Göttingen, 1802-22, and was adopted by J.-B. de Lamarck (1744-1829) in his Hydrogéologie, Paris, 1802. It is probable that the first English use of the word in its modern sense is by Sir William Lawrence (1783-1867) in his work On the Physiology, Zoology, and Natural History of Man, London, 1819; there are earlier English uses of the word, however, contrasted with biography.
[2] The remains of Alcmaeon are given in H. Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Berlin, 1903, p. 103. Alcmaeon is considered in the companion chapter on Greek Medicine.